


Sold

by skcm



Series: Waste [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Relationship, drunk accident kissing, in which rj maccready feels bad for his boss, in which the boss represses a hell of a lot about her past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 17:07:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5341850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skcm/pseuds/skcm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who says that? Comic book heroes, maybe, or just the smarmy kids in ‘em, really unrealistic portrayals, all things considered. It’s so cheesy, like, she can’t even wrap her mind around being anything but a mom, all the time.</p>
<p>Which is funny, because her whole thing, her whole dang deal is that she’s so un-momlike when her mouth is shut. She’s tall and broad, and a little scary if you asked Mac and he was loose-lipped drunk enough not to lie. Which people have, now and again, and usually in bar bathrooms after a night. A normal night. The kind of night everyone in the Wasteland has, honestly, full of drowning sorrows or at least forcing them into the shadows for a couple of hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sold

Hunching over on a Goodneighbor bench like a pile of iron chains, it’s as if Tex is bound to something beyond those intermittent bouts of wandering the Wasteland. Maybe it’s her little scramble for revenge, something she says she has on the back burner, even though it hangs from her, a weighted ball clanging and scraping the ground whenever she tries to move forward.

The neon lights in the city aren’t any more or less caked in dirt than the people in it. Some asshole on the street probably remarked, once upon a time and standing beside a fresh kill, that “at least it’s honest here,” and the son of a bitch might have been right. Goodneighbor clings to you like ancient dust, but it never drags you down, even as its denizens clamber ever lower, guns toward the sky.

Tex already has the downer act covered, anyway, with those sighs and rolls of her shoulders, with her head sagging so low you’d think she was wearing a necklace with a boulder for a pendant, a big, heavy-ass, dead and dull gem, like if ‘the family jewels’ wasn’t a joke about testicles.

MacCready makes a beeline for her, tucking a corner of his vest into his pants casually, like he didn’t just piss in an adjacent alley. “That’s why your back’s always ticking you off, you know.” Pretty smug for a guy waving his dick around right outside Bobbi’s base of operations, ‘cause of all the places here, taking a public leak by the door with the peep window has got to be the stupidest one.

“Huh?” She looks in the wrong direction.

MacCready waves his hand where her eyes should be. She’s fucking with him, isn’t she? “MacCready to Tex. I’m over here. Heeeeeere.”

Tex snaps her chin around and gives him a perceptibly fake, if weirdly charming grin. “Yeah, Mac, I’m just goofing.”

Who says that? Comic book heroes, maybe, or just the smarmy kids in ‘em, really unrealistic portrayals, all things considered. It’s so cheesy, like, she can’t even wrap her mind around being anything but a mom, all the time.

Which is funny, because her whole thing, her whole dang deal is that she’s so un-momlike when her mouth is shut. She’s tall and broad, and a little scary if you asked Mac and he was loose-lipped drunk enough not to lie. Which people have, now and again, and usually in bar bathrooms after a night. A normal night. The kind of night everyone in the Wasteland has, honestly, full of drowning sorrows or at least forcing them into the shadows for a couple of hours.

They don’t drink all the time, though. They smoke like pork ‘n beans left on the stove too long, so it’s no surprise when MacCready passes her a preserved Gray Tortoise and practically stuffs it in her mouth, leans in, and presses his lit end to hers as she inhales and grumbles.

“Mmfrckr.” Tex twists her two centuries old antique, the chintzy brass wedding ring she and Nate were hoodwinked into getting the matching pair of by a clever pawnbroker halfway between Brooklyn and Boston. She puffs smoke out of the corner of her mouth, holding the cigarette with her lips because her hands are ever busy at that ring, but soon her eyes aren’t, at least, and she blinks up at MacCready a few times. He’s been standing there like a green tree in the middle of the Commonwealth, baffling in his aliveness, somehow sturdier than branched but leafless fellows, and totally in the fucking way, too close for comfort.

“I know, I know. Personal space and all that.” He plunks down on the bench with a good two feet between them, limp hands hanging between his legs, more of a slouched mess than his boss all of a sudden.

“Hey Mac.” She has the ring in her cupped palm, the cigarette between her fingers, and the rising smoke in the space between them draws him closer. MacCready stares at the smoke, and not the ring. He doesn’t know what it’s worth, and doesn’t want to think about why she’s flashing it out in the open here. Bad enough she wears it at all in a place like Goodneighbor-- good she still has it, though.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to make an honest man of me, boss.” He flutters his lashes at Tex, who looks like she’s about to punch him with her free fist.

“You know you’re a little shit, right? Here’s what I want you to do: We’re short on caps. Sucker someone into buying this hunk of junk for more than it’s worth.”

“Junk? What’s it made of?”

“Nothing worth anything, Mac. You game?”

“Hel-- Heck yeah, I am!” Against his better judgment, he rips the ring from her open hand and clutches it tight for a beat or two. It’s still warm. Her palm is still open and it feels unfair now, like she’s hesitating, like she wants it back.

MacCready lets the ring drop.

“Where’s your entrepreneurial spirit, Mac? Gunshy or something?”

“You sure you wanna sell your ring? I mean, I don’t care what it’s made of, really, but something like that doesn’t come back. It gets melted down and hammered into a bullet by some mutie who yanked it off a dead scavver, who got it from a raider camp, who stole it from a really distractable guy over at Bunker Hill.”

“That’s a pretty elaborate fantasy there, buddy. What if I told you I’d split the caps? Seventy-thirty, in your favor.”

“You’re killin’ me here, boss.”

“This _thing_ is killing me. Bring it to Daisy or whatever, and don’t tell her where you got it. Make up some badass story. You’re good at that.” Tex lifts the cigarette to her lips, freeing up fingers to lace between MacCready’s, but despite the closeness of the gesture, she’s just fucking around again, just passing him the ring once more. “Godspeed, Mac.”

She shakes his hand and it’s firm, like a threat, and in an instant their twined fingers feel more like a chain fence, keeping something in or out, but definitely there, and standing fast against all the shit the Wasteland throws at it.

It’s... something.

MacCready doesn’t keep his promise to sell it for a mean haul of caps, though. He slides it across the counter at Daisy’s, and the ghoul’s eyes sling down at it like she’s being dealt some ominous hand of cards, like a game with her life on the line.

“What? MacCready? You bust up a wedding or something?”

“Not my style, Daise. You should know that by now.”

“Wait a sec-- isn’t this the ring that Vault gal you’ve been pallin’ around with always wears?”

“No! _No_. It’s-- listen, we messed with some Triggermen. You know Skinny Malone? This thing? Toe ring. Still warm, too!”

“That’s a little bit sickening, MacCready. I’ll take it, but I can’t offer much in return.”

“How about a bottle of whiskey?”

Daisy’s stare cuts clean across, but it softens. “Yeah, alright. You’re good in my book, anyway.” She takes the ring and hands MacCready a bottle of whiskey from a dusty adjacent shelf.

He sneaks up behind the boss and rests the bottle of whiskey on her shoulder while she’s stamping out her cigarette.

“What the hell, Mac? Asshole.” She lingers, bent, and MacCready keeps pressing that damn bottle into her skin, against her bones.

“We’re splitting it. Seventy-thirty. I’ll drink thirty percent, you drink seventy percent, and you tell me why the f-- why you wanted to sell your ring. Deal?”

Tex scowls. “No deal.” She twists and takes the bottle from him anyway. “I’m gonna need a hundred percent of the day’s profits if you want a sob story out of me, okay?”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Tex echoes, eyeing the flickering sign for Hotel Rexford. They may as well turn in. She may as well get wasted. MacCready may as well watch her make an idiot of herself. He’s done it enough so far, and stuck around despite that. Stuck around despite the caps running dry, too. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“Eighty-twenty,” MacCready decides. “We solid?”

“Yeah, whatever. Let’s get out of here. They owe me a free stay at the hotel for doing something or other worth noting that I can’t quite pinpoint ‘cause last night we had all those pints at the Third Rail. Remember?”

“Not... precisely?”

“No skin off my ass. We’re solid, anyway. Right, Mac?” She forces a smile at him, but it goes through to the other side and rips at his heart a little, and then a lot.

“Right, boss. I’m still following, aren’t I?”

He is, and he does, right up to the filthy room on the third floor, with no windows and stale air, and a bottle of whiskey, and his scary boss, and stories about Brooklyn. Stories about Sanctuary. Stories about a guy named Damon Nataniel, who became Nate when she became Clara, and how they hid from the families that dogged them both behind the surname ‘Texas,’ and about how they met in a strip club, but also when she worked in a different strip club, and all about fighting fires and moving furniture, about packing boxes and packing heat and all about Shaun who was so young Tex had no idea if he looked like his father or not.

When she’s done with the talking and done with the tears, falling over with fatigue, MacCready smiles through how goddamn _sober_ he is, and then she kisses him, quick and impulsive, like she’s stupid, like she’s determined to fuck up a perfectly good professional dynamic, and then she stops, and neither question why aloud, but they sleep with that invisible chain fence between them, tense and barbed and intimidating them both into silence.

**Author's Note:**

> my brain is unreliable but i'm hoping i can write more and turn this into a little drabbley series eventually.


End file.
